Sin, stilettos and the stenographer

Literature was once about escapism, fine prose and imagination. Increasingly, it's about sniggering at the unrealities of the social set, writes Alex Kuczynski.

When Truman Capote was asked in 1975 to defend his novella Answered Prayers, which painted cruel portraits of socialites he considered his close friends, he said something that struck some critics as heresy.

"My book isn't gossip," he said. "Except in the sense that all literature is gossip."

The rumour mill has fuelled fiction from Euripides to Sex and the City. But in the past two years, the publishing industry has embraced a genre that might be described as "gossip lit", turning out a flotilla of best-selling novels that rely less on the craft of literature than on the recycling of rumour and on their authors' well-positioned perches.

If the fun of gossip lit is not necessarily in the deftness of its prose, it is in the tantalising promise of the guessing game. For readers familiar with the incestuous fiefs of high society, fashion and Hollywood chronicled in daily columns, there is the task of unravelling a torrent of potentially salacious blind items. For civilian readers, there is the thrill of witnessing the workings of a surreal, ostentatious universe where rich people spend $350 on blue jeans.

Two years ago, the gossip lit book was The Nanny Diaries, written by two former nannies, which portrayed well-heeled Manhattan mothers as spoiled and inane. The nannies had worked for some women on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, and a few clued-in New Yorkers guessed their identities.

Last year, it was The Devil Wears Prada, Lauren Weisberger's barely veiled account of her time working as an assistant to Anna Wintour, the editor-in-chief of Vogue.

Now there is Bergdorf Blondes, the barely disguised memoir by Plum Sykes, a contributor to Vogue, about life among the perpetually blonde and happily anorexic fashionista set. And last month brought the publication of The Right Address, by Carrie Karasyov and Jill Kargman. Their novel skewers a certain kind of woman whose only ambition is to preside over benefit dinners (even if she goes to so many she cannot remember from night to night if she is at the Irritable Bowel Syndrome Ball or the Food Allergy Ball), and to have her photo appear in the party pages of any magazine.

Long before the book's publication, editors at Town & Country were poring over advance copies of the manuscript, picking out similarities to real-world social butterflies, billionaire philanderers and business royalty.

While gossip has long churned beneath the pages of the finest literature, the current crop of books is slightly different. "What is new is the fact that the public is less demanding in terms of quality when it comes to social reportage disguised as zeitgeisty fiction," said the literary agent David Kuhn. "Right now, it seems as though someone who has a sexy concept or milieu to exploit can get away with being a less-than-stellar prose stylist, whereas before, it was more important to deliver on both the idea and the execution."

Candace Bushnell, whose newspaper column and book inspired the television success Sex and the City, described gossip lit books - which she has perused - as light and in some cases mean-spirited.

She said that gossip lit authors were almost all in their 20s. "And oddly enough, I think they can be the nastiest people on the planet," she said. "When people get into their 30s and 40s, they have struggled and worked hard and they have a bit of an adult perspective."

Plum Sykes said that she, for one, did not consider her book gossip lit because she never used her medium to take down an employer or to criticise social figures.

"They're about taking down the boss, or taking down the power figures," she said. "If you notice, in my book, they never even go to work. They have careers, as in, 'Oh! I must remember to do my career today."'

Regular readers of The New York Post will recognise, in the unhappy affair that Sykes's heroine has with a "hot young photographer", an echo of Sykes's own well chronicled break-up with the painter Damien Loeb.

Loeb said he had read a few chapters of Bergdorf Blonde before it was published. "I was not overjoyed," he said. "The things that are fictionalised no one is going to believe are fiction. And then there are details that I thought were private, and when you are in a relationship with someone, assume will remain private."

He had no plans to read the entire book.

EVEN though gossip lit is centred on the peccadilloes of wealthy, bossy New York editors and socialites, the books sell very well in parts of the world that one of their characters might refer to as "flyover territory".

Cathy Langer, a Denver bookstore buyer, said that at first she was sceptical about The Nanny Diaries and The Devil Wears Prada. "They seemed so East Coast," Langer said. "And they turned out huge, huge, huge."

Readers were not necessarily drawn by the fact that the authors were former insiders. "I didn't get that as much as I got that readers cared about good, fun dirt. And I guess because it was insiders' dirt, it felt like real dirt."

The dirty truth about gossip is that it makes up a normal part of almost everyone's daily life and perhaps even of the human evolutionary backbone. Some studies have compared it with communal grooming among primates, an activity known to stimulate the release of endorphins, which relieve stress and boost the immune system.

So perhaps it is not surprising that the thirst for gossip lit is apparently as unslaked as that of a Bergdorf blonde whose refrigerator holds just one tub of yoghurt. Weisberger, apparently no longer welcomed with open arms by the fashion crowd, was paid a reported $1 million to write another novel, about a gossip columnist. Next year, Miramax Books will publish The Twins of TriBeCa, a novel about a young woman working in marketing at a movie studio, written by Rachel Pine, a former member of the Miramax marketing staff. Sykes is at work on a new book about wealthy young divorcees.

Several similar books are set in Los Angeles, among them The Second Assistant: A Tale from the Bottom of the Hollywood Ladder, due out this month.

And Kargman and Karasyov are working on another novel. It features a younger crowd of equally obnoxious paparazzi-courting New Yorkers.

"If you live uptown and go to the local manicurist," Kargman said, "you'll hear these people talking about their second homes and their interior decorators and the new landing pad for the helicopter at their country house, and on and on, and they will talk as if they are in their own living room.

"They have no idea there is this writer sitting there, and the digital tape recorder in my brain is putting down the 1s and 0s of their dialogue. And believe me, there is an endless, endless trough of these people to draw upon."